1. Field of Invention
The present invention generally relates to data transfer on the bus, and more particularly, to a method of hot switching data transfer rate on the bus.
2. Description of Related Art
In the information explosion era, information processing and information exchange have become more and more important. Since it is so important, how to make the process and information transmission faster is a common objective of present technological development. In the distributed process computer system, between chips that bear different tasks, fast exchange of information is the major factor impacting system performance. Taking the control chips of a computer motherboard as an example, the bus between the north-bridge chip and the south-bridge chip demands a large amount of data transfer. Therefore, its data transfer rate has advanced rapidly. However, while the data transfer rate on the bus has advanced rapidly, power consumption has also increased accordingly. Current computer systems have contradictory needs in data transfer rate and power consumption required to satisfy a sufficient amount of the data transfer rate. Therefore, the data transfer rate on the bus between the control chipsets at present is fixed at a data transfer rate of sufficient amount when the system is up and stable. This data transfer rate has to take into consideration the maximum transfer demand, but when there is no demand for such a large data transfer rate between the control chipsets, power consumption is still high.